No Points for Difficulty

Running a business is not like Olympic diving. You don’t get points for difficulty. Which is why is was a little frustrated with one of my clients last week. We were talking about role scorecards – a one-page description of the key responsibilities, measures, and expected behaviour of any position.

We’d done a good job of walking through the CEO role, but when I’d asked them to replicate the same for other roles, she sent me a two page description of roles and responsibilities. She said it’s what “she needs”.

OK, fine, but in the end it’s not about us. It’s about them. It’s about making clear to the people working for us what’s expected of them. But the longer we talk about it (or the more we write about it) the less clear it becomes. Which is why getting a job description down to one page is really really hard, but really really worth it.

I was emptying the dishwasher and catching up with my teenage daughter on the weekend, telling her about my week. Now maybe I’ve just rubbed off on her a bit, but she got it.

This is a girl who wants to open her own retail fashion store one day, and gets that if she wants to design and manufacture her own clothing line, she’s going to have to a) make money, and b) have people working for her that can do the job. Business is hard enough. Why make it harder?

I hugged her. She doesn’t let me hug her very often, but this time I insisted.